The Sunday Haul (on 3-7-2016)

Of the many agonies that some bibliophiles like me experience one in particular I face quite often. When one is looking for a particular title by an author that has made him/her famous it is agonizing to find other titles by the author other than the one you are searching for. I’ve gone through this agonizing experience several times in the past. I’ve come across ‘Killing Mister Watson’ and also ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’ when I was looking for Peter Matthiessen’s ‘The Snow Leopard’ that I ultimately found after a long search. Similarly I came across copies of ‘Play as it Lays’ by Joan Didion and other titles when it was her ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ that I was desperately looking for. While looking for JM Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’ I kept seeing many copies of ‘The Life and Times of K’ until finally I found it sometime recently.

For me this agony is doubled because I have developed this curious habit of not reading any other title by an author until I’ve read the title that made the author famous. Though it was ‘The Group’ by Mary McCarthy that I was hoping to find since a long time I never was able to find a single copy all these years. However I found ‘Venice Observed’ a couple of years ago but haven’t read it because I wanted to read ‘The Group’ first before reading other titles by this author.

Last Sunday, finally, I spotted an old copy of ‘The Group’ with a seller at the RTC Crossroads on the way back home from Abids where I hadn’t been lucky. The copy of ‘The Group’ I saw had a faded cover and looked like a very old copy. No wonder the seller had dumped it in a heap of books being sold for twenty rupees. I took it but not the copy of ‘The Charmed Circle’that was also there in the same heap. Now I am wondering if I should have bought this title too.